Choiceless self-awareness

If there is something "meditating" then that is not meditation as K discussed it. When the mind is completely empty, still. When there is no movement of thought just attention then that is meditation. The meditator is an invention of thought. There is no one "attending". There is just attention: An awareness of the present without any interpretation.

Rich Nolet wrote:What happen next ? Is it that those memories are reinforce or sink in oblivion, as being necessary or unnecessary ?

Hi Rich and all. Perhaps there are times of intense observation that stick in the memory. When you bring a great deal of attention to a situation, is it more memorable? Is this linked to interest? For example, I have friends who are capable of observing a rare bird in the field with a great deal of attention, noting tiny details of the bird's appearance and behaviour. Afterwards, they can write about the observation in great detail as well. Does the mind become quiet when there is observation with great attention taking place?

Some people post in a way that sounds like they are coming from knowing rather than discovering. They may not know. On the other hand, they may have some insight. Why should K have a monopoly on insight? Can't others also have discovered? At least to some degree? People who act like they know something may have partial insight that can be refined with interaction. Or they may really be off base. The important thing for our interaction is that we challenge the ideas, not attack the people. Then we can inquire together.

Other people want to come from not knowing and very much want to challenge. To them, any knowing is self-deception and off the mark. Isn't all knowing thought, the past, old and stale? This approach is fine too, as long as we question what is being said and steer clear of personal attacks. If we can do this, we honor K's spirit of dialogue, friendly yet serious and investigative.

To dialogue without attacking takes a certain amount of awareness and sensitivity, doesn't it? Of course, if a personal attack happens, it also takes maturity and awareness of reaction to not respond in kind. With attention, we really do dialogue without it degenerating. Thank you!

To me, it is clear that memory did operate in K. Perhaps, it was different than the way your memory and mine operate. Perhaps the main thing was that it was factual and without the kind of emotionally charged memory that bolsters ego.

I have cited how K could write in his notebook remembering details later, after they took place. Also, Mary Z. was surprised and impressed that K could remember the location of certain hiking trails years after they had walked on them. Somewhat more controversially, K seemed to be able to remember details about the Rajagopals that involved conflict, despite his claim to be free of conflict. Perhaps, again, he remembered facts about the conflict while internally he really was free of it.

There are humans who have suffered brain damage such that they can no longer store long term memory. They have their distant memories intact, but new short term memories last only a matter of minutes at most and then are gone. These patients lead lives that require constant care and assistance. To me, theirs is not an enlightened state but rather a sadly dependent one.

Memory really is necessary for the factual and the practical. Can our remembering be completely free of distortion, emotion, and influence on self? I don't know. However, without a doubt, awareness can transform significantly, especially when coupled with understanding the ego boosting process that we can observe in our thinking and our relating.

One of the main issues we are investigating in this thread is technique and its problems. We know that K expressed strongly that there can be no technique in true awareness/meditation. In a way, this is the same as, "Truth is a pathless land." In other words, the truth is here now. There is no path (or technique) to what is right here now. Yet we often live blind to what is true, in conflict internally and externally.

So we have been looking deeper than knowing a simple rule, "no technique," and trying to understand what about technique is problematic and why.

Very commonly K cites mantra meditation as a technique. He says something like, "You might as well chant 'Coca-Cola' over and over again." Some people take their mantra very seriously and ascribe a magical transformative power to it. K gently belittles such supernatural thinking by implying that any old syllables will achieve the same effect.

What is the effect? Isn't it a narrowing of the mind? Thought is quieted. But not naturally. When thought arises, the instruction is to return to the internal mantra, to allow the mantra to predominate consciousness. Isn't the mantra itself a mechanical thought? And the technique is to allow this one sound thought to overpower all others that might arise.

Now, K asks, is truth exclusion? This is so important! Is mantra meditation, or some other meditation technique that involves exclusion and narrowing, something that can lead to totality, to what K calls the "enormity?" Doesn't such forced exclusion of thought lead to dullness rather than clarity and openness? Although the mantra practitioner may achieve a more unified, less scattered mind, after years of practice, isn't it also a closed, limited mind?

We have examined the following problems with technique:

repetitive pattern, intentionality, the division of the controller/controlled or the meditator/meditation, and narrowing of mind.

We have also touched on how technique involves becoming rather than what is. It involves the attempt to change what is.

Are there any other problems with technique that we should look at? Have we fully investigated why technique is a dead end?

And now we come to an extremely real problem. We see the importance of meditation/awareness. And we see that there is no technique to make it happen. So what do we do when it doesn't spontaneously happen? Am I helpless and just have to wait eternally for a miracle? Is it a rare mutation and 99.999% of us are just out of luck? Did K really offer no technique?

You advocate the technique of interaction? Exchanging comparing and contrasting information/knowledge/belief is the same tired path of knowledge. You/we can call it different names, we can insist that it is something Krishnamurti advocated but, it's still the same old stuff, just a different day. Are we doomed to repeat the past?

Knowing/believing in advance that techniques of knowledge are a dead end......

Three posts and several paragraphs later we have nothing to show except we are all a little bit older.

Expressing our knowledge about the things K discussed is not investigation.

The only "technique" K advocated was silent internal observation. It's a lifestyle, not something we do to entertain ourselves over the internet a few minutes a day in between our struggles to find meaning.

Just curious, where does K in his many years of talking, advocate 35 years after he is dead in groups large or small that we talk about the things we don't know?

This post was last updated by richard head (account deleted) Sun, 14 Jan 2018.

idiot ? wrote:And now we come to an extremely real problem. We see the importance of meditation/awareness. And we see that there is no technique to make it happen. So what do we do when it doesn't spontaneously happen? Am I helpless and just have to wait eternally for a miracle? Is it a rare mutation and 99.999% of us are just out of luck? Did K really offer no technique?

K. suggest choiceless awareness, to be passively aware. Do one consider this as being a technique ? Or is it that one must have, first, the intention to understand what meditation is ? I wouldn't say that having the intention to undertstand what meditation is is a technique, a pattern. But there must be some kind of momentum to begin with. Just some thought.

idiot ? wrote:And now we come to an extremely real problem. We see the importance of meditation/awareness. And we see that there is no technique to make it happen. So what do we do when it doesn't spontaneously happen? Am I helpless and just have to wait eternally for a miracle? Is it a rare mutation and 99.999% of us are just out of luck? Did K really offer no technique?

Listen. You can take this or leave it. You can stop reading now if you want. There is nothing to do, there is no miracle that's going to happen to make you "see". There is no technique.

Reality/truth is here all around you. It has always been here and it will always be here. But it is you; all your knowledge and experience, and your desire that keeps you sitting in the movie house of your thoughts watching all the shows, the movies that your thought is projecting onto all the walls that you have surrounded yourself with.

"Idiot" of course it is not just you we are all doing this. Let go. Don't seek anything, don't be anything, don't give a shit (to put it crudely) and just be relaxed, be aware/attentive, be happy to still be alive and let go of wanting or expecting anything. In the end you are going to die. Live now, completely. That's all there is. Or as K once said to a member of the audience who asked him for the millionth time if there is reincarnation he said, "Incarnate Now!"

Rich Nolet wrote:If one is aware of the division between meditator and meditation, then isn't it what meditation is ? Experience, according to K. is going through, passer au travers, it leave no trace because there is no goal. Seeing the division is in itself a state of experience without division, is it ? Is there any value in it? Is the end of conflict in the observation of any value ?

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Jack Pine wrote:If there is something "meditating" then that is not meditation as K discussed it. When the mind is completely empty, still. When there is no movement of thought just attention then that is meditation. The meditator is an invention of thought. There is no one "attending". There is just attention: An awareness of the present without any interpretation.

Above are two posts that seemingly contradict each other and yet interestingly we can find truth in both of them.

As Nolet points out, seeing the division between meditator and meditation is itself an awareness, without a goal. For many of us, things may stop there. We realize that both the meditator activity and the meditation activity are just brain activity within us. It is all one self that has divided itself. But we may be stuck there, unable to shake the division. Or perhaps the meditator really may dissolve. In any case, there is watching all this. And that watching is a kind of awareness.

Now, Pine says, it may be a level of awareness, but it is not full on real meditation where there is no division at all, where the mind is completely empty and still, where all thought of a meditator or of meditation has quieted down. Pure attention.

Is it just a matter of defining "meditation?" Is the first a kind of beginning step toward real meditation and the latter actually real meditation?

Have you noticed that K doesn't give us a step by step toward meditation? That would be a method, a technique. And we have been going into detail about the problems with that.

No, K says, "The first step is the last step!"

What?!

Although there is clearly a difference between someone initially noticing a conflict within, taking the first step, and someone completely free of conflict, in total open attention, yet that attention is exactly the same. It is the very same awareness. The first step is the last step. And yet what a difference between the one carrying the baggage of division/self and the one free of it.

Here is a Krishnamurti quote from Tradition and Revolution Dialogue 5 New Delhi 19th December 1970:

You know, when we said that the first step is the last step, were we not thinking of time as a horizontal or a vertical movement? Were we not thinking of movement along a plane? We were saying yesterday, when we were walking, if we could put aside height, the vertical and the horizontal altogether, and observe this fact that wherever we are, at whatever level of conditioning, of being, the perceiving of truth, of the fact, is at that moment the last step.

I am a clerk in a little office, with all the misery involved in it; the clerk listens and perceives. The man listens and at that moment really sees. That seeing and that perception is the first and the last step. Because, at that moment he has touched truth and he sees something very clearly.

But what happens afterwards is that he wants to cultivate that state. The perception, the liberation and the very perception bringing about liberation; he wants to perpetuate, to turn it into a process. And therefore he gets caught and loses the quality of perception entirely.

So, what we are saying is that any process involves finality. It is a movement from the horizontal to the vertical; the vertical leading to a finality. And therefore we think that perception, liberation is a finality; a point which has no movement. After all, the methods, the practices, the systems imply a process towards a finality.

If there were no conceptual idea of finality, there would be no process.

Jack Pine wrote:There is nothing to do, there is no miracle that's going to happen to make you "see"... Let go. Don't seek anything, don't be anything, don't give a shit (to put it crudely) and just be relaxed, be aware/attentive, be happy to still be alive and let go of wanting or expecting anything. In the end you are going to die. Live now, completely. That's all there is.

It seems to me that quite a few K interested people reach a view like the above, more or less. Since any method, technique, or process is time bound and therefore with an eye on an ideal, of liberation or some other finality, then clearly they are false. We've gone into this quite a bit now.

But don't we have to be careful about complacency? Are we just fine about all the violence in the world? Obviously, there is incredible anger and political division. There is a crisis of conflict, within and without, isn't there?

So we're just supposed to be happy-go-lucky? Go with the flow? Everything is fine?

No. I can't be blind to the fighting and suffering I see. We can even see a lot of violence and attack right here on kinfonet, where supposedly we are interested in and care about these matters. And observing my thoughts, I see my own conflict with others and my own internal conflict with myself that ripples outward.

So are we going to just be content? And therefore blind to all this strife?

Don't we need to investigate this more? I hope that we have a sense of what K calls "the urgency of change."

idiot ? wrote:And now we come to an extremely real problem. We see the importance of meditation/awareness. And we see that there is no technique to make it happen. So what do we do when it doesn't spontaneously happen? Am I helpless and just have to wait eternally for a miracle? Is it a rare mutation and 99.999% of us are just out of luck? Did K really offer no technique?

This indeed seems to be an extremely real problem and one which all of us face. In the video which was posted at the beginning of this thread, Krishnamurti said the following:

"One has to be tremendously aware of every movement of thought."

This is not a technique obviously. However, the way he said this, with great emphasis on this words "tremendously" and "every", certainly gives us a clear indication of what one needs to do if one is to be free of the constant interference of thought. Isn't this an important statement?

idiot ? wrote:So we're just supposed to be happy-go-lucky? Go with the flow? Everything is fine?

No. I can't be blind to the fighting and suffering I see.

No, not when it's right in front of my eyes. When I see the homeless and poor people begging for money in front of the liquor store. When I reflect on the fact I can't even walk in some neighborhoods near where I live without fear of being robbed or assaulted. When a young relative of mine was afraid to ride the bus to school because the young males were so vulgar and violent. When the security guards in the school must carry guns.....to protect themselves from the violent students! When our rivers and oceans are being destroyed by pollution. Don't worry, be happy...everything is fine?

idiot ? wrote:So, what we are saying is that any process involves finality. It is a movement from the horizontal to the vertical; the vertical leading to a finality. And therefore we think that perception, liberation is a finality; a point which has no movement. After all, the methods, the practices, the systems imply a process towards a finality.

If there were no conceptual idea of finality, there would be no process.

That is very interesting in regard to the inquiry into meditation. Because it demonstrate, if I may suggest, that the way we appraoch meditation is , effectivily , conditioned by our way of thinking. Don't we think in term of finality ? As you say, the methods, the practices, the systems imply a process towards a finality.

Is there a particular moment to meditate ? And the rest of the time we don't ? Isn't it the way we appraoch meditation, for one ? May I suggest a quote about meditation from The Only Revolution, India part 9:

Do not think that meditation is a continuance and an expansion of
experience. In experience there is always the witness and he is ever tied to the
past. Meditation, on the contrary, is that complete inaction which is the ending
of all experience. The action of experience has its roots in the past and so it is
time-binding; it leads to action which is inaction, and brings disorder.
Meditation is the total inaction which comes out of a mind that sees what is,
without the entanglement of the past. This action is not a response to any
challenge but is the action of the challenge itself, in which there is no duality.
Meditation is the emptying of experience and is going on all the time,
consciously or unconsciously, so it is not an action limited to a certain period
during the day. It is a continuous action from morning till night - the watching
without the watcher. Therefore there is no division between the daily life and
meditation, the religious life and the secular life. The division comes only when
the watcher is tied to time. In this division there is disarray, misery and
confusion, which is the state of society.

Meditation is the innocency of the present, and therefore it is always alone.
The mind that is completely alone, untouched by thought, ceases to
accumulate. So the emptying of the mind is always in the present. For the
mind that is alone, the future - which is of the past - ceases. Meditation is a
movement, not a conclusion, not an end to be achieved.

Meditation is not a separate thing from life; it is the very essence of life, the
very essence of daily living. To listen to those bells, to hear the laughter of that
peasant as he walks by with his wife, to listen to the sound of the bell on the
bicycle of the little girl as she passes by: it is the whole of life, and not just a
fragment of it, that meditation opens.

idiot ? wrote:Above are two posts that seemingly contradict each other and yet interestingly we can find truth in both of them.

idiot ? wrote:So are we going to just be content? And therefore blind to all this strife?

That is not even close to what I was pointing out. This is just your understanding of what you think I was saying. Maybe, it you're interested, you should read what I wrote again and not just pull part of it out and make a judgement about it that completely misses the point. If you are not interested in what I wrote that's OK too.

Oh hell yes, please go ahead and don't be happy, don't feel joy in just living and instead worry and fret about the world. And continue on believing that if you just work hard enough, intellectualize long enough you will suddenly be "enlightened". I mean this is what we have been told all of our lives. Work hard and you'll achieve everything you want. Do you even understand what conditioning means?* Everything you think and say is a product of your conditioning. Do you think that conditioning is going to end itself? Really?

*If you don't understand how K used the word "conditioning" then replace it with "programming" or "programmed" . It's the same thing. We are programmed by our knowledge and experience to see the world in a particular way. The programmed state, try as it might, is what is blocking all of us from reality or truth or whatever you want to call it. That

Jack Pine wrote:Idiot? Don't you ever get tired of over thinking everything?

Since I was told that I sometimes blurt things out rather than go into details carefully like K did, in this thread I have been exploring in detail with people the many problems with method/technique. We are moving, somewhat together I hope, to clarifying meditation and seeing if K advocated doing anything or nothing. Some have already mentioned that K advocated choiceless awareness and following every thought. I expect we will explore these in greater depth soon.

Jack Pine wrote:What you wrote above not only proves that you didn't understand what I wrote but more importantly you still think you can "progress", "achieve", find an "end" a conclusion that will help you understand or gain "enlightenment" or whatever it is you're after.

No, I do not think you can progress and reach a finality. We have gone into a lot of detail that this is exactly a central problem with technique. If I have misunderstood what you have written, please explain.

How does: "Don't seek anything, don't be anything, don't give a shit (to put it crudely) and just be relaxed, be aware/attentive, be happy to still be alive and let go of wanting or expecting anything," how does that deal with the violence and suffering that exist? That is what I'm asking. Perhaps it does deal with it and we can find out how.

Jack Pine wrote:You're completely lost.

A personal attack. If you really feel that I'm completely lost then you should, of course, stop all interaction. To me that would be too bad because I appreciate many of your contributions above. I am not attacking you personally: I am questioning how what you wrote about not wanting anything can relate to the violence and suffering we see.

Jack Pine wrote:Yes by all means investigate the hell out of whatever you want. It's worked so well for you so far.

A sarcastic personal attack. Actually, investigating what K said has in fact worked very well which is probably why we are all, including you, here. Sometimes our interactions can get strongly emotional. And this is probably because we deeply care about these matters. But the way through that, it seems to me, is see our reactivity and remain respectful.

idiot ? wrote:How does: "Don't seek anything, don't be anything, don't give a shit (to put it crudely) and just be relaxed, be aware/attentive, be happy to still be alive and let go of wanting or expecting anything," how does that deal with the violence and suffering that exist? That is what I'm asking. Perhaps it does deal with it and we can find out how.

It would be good to explore this further. There's obviously tremendous suffering in the world. Perhaps it doesn't affect me directly. What about the suffering in 'me'? That can't be easily put aside, can it? Maybe I'm financially secure and in good health and don't feel that I suffer. However most of us do suffer, and we became interested in K because we want to understand why we live this way.....with anxiety and worry....depression perhaps....smoking, drinking, over eating...escaping to the TV and sports...entertainment....but very bored with all the escapes which don't provide lasting relief from my suffering. So suffering, for most of us, is 'what is', and can't easily be put aside. K said that we can get to the bottom of it and be free of suffering, so I'm assuming that's why most of us are here. To find out if it's possible to be free of suffering.

Jack Pine wrote:The programmed state, try as it might, is what is blocking all of us from reality or truth or whatever you want to call it. That

Regarding the "programming" or "conditioning", a factor of it that gets overlooked by me in the approach to K.'s work is what is described in the K. excerpt that Idiot posted (#75), the "concept of finality". The concept of finality (accomplishment, result etc.) got carried over (as I'm seeing it) from the technical, practical realm into the psychological. Unconsciously I am seeking a result...I do not see that it is 'enough' just to 'be with the fact of 'what is', with no future result, with no future reward, with no future 'finality'. This programming or conditioning makes me turn the idea of 'liberation' into a "process" and then I'm always looking sub-conciously to the 'finalizing' of that process at any given moment (through insight) or at some point in time, in the 'future'. This 'expectation' of the 'end' of the 'process' ( enlightenment, silence,etc.) ignores (devalues?) the ever-present 'what is' which K. has said is "sacred".

No doubt you know that time, "psychological time," is a problem discussed in K teaching. We have been talking about how meditation techniques involve a time process, a becoming, and that implies a finality, which is an idea set in the future of time. And you have heard K on "what is," "the outside of time," "the sacred."

However, what about time actually in the teachings? "The urgency of change," "transformation," "revolution," "action without idea." Change, which is a difference occurring over time, is actually in the teachings. K is NOT saying, we live in a crisis, just sit there and be fine about it. But K is very careful with time. And so in fact, there isn't a real contradiction between change and freedom from time in the teachings, only an apparent one:

In one story, K talks about walking down a country road. A rock is seen in the road, a rock that might do harm to someone coming along later. The rock is moved out the road. The walk continues. There is not mental deliberation about whether or not to move it, about the process of moving it, about the final result. The rock is seen and moved. Loving action, action without idea, happens in the moment. The seeing is the doing.

Notice what didn't happen: awareness of the rock and not doing anything about it.

Now this relates to meditation that we have been talking about. Many people see that K placed enormous importance on meditation. He made it the topic of the final day when he gave weeklong talks. They also see the problems with regard to meditation technique. And so they think nothing can be done. They don't sit down quietly. They don't follow their thought. They see the rock in the road and leave it there. Therefore, violence continues within them. Therefore, it ripples out into the world.

idiot ? wrote:And so they think nothing can be done. They don't sit down quietly. They don't follow their thought.

I see that conclusion as a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding of what K. has said. He has made it clear that thought must be followed, that it is 'arduous' etc. The point that I found so important in that excerpt about the "concept of finality" is that it all can be done in the 'wrong' way and that is the discovery that each of us has to make for ourself, no matter what or how we 'do' whatever it is. The 'self' is ultimately only interested in its own self and salvation (no matter what it thinks or says) Awareness of the self and its subtle motives and desires are revealed in relationship, in the moment. It is a choiceless awareness. It does not 'judge', judging is the realm of the 'self'. And 'finality' is a kind of judgement,i.e. "How close or far, am I from the 'goal'?

but there is no urgency, there is no real sensitivity to the harm happening.

Yes that is the 'fact'. That is 'what is'.

Possibly not until it hits home. Until we're suffering ourself and the usual escapes fail to bring any relief, it's 'business as usual'.... tv, films, sports, food, booze, career ambitions, and the rest.

idiot ? wrote:How does: "Don't seek anything, don't be anything, don't give a shit (to put it crudely) and just be relaxed, be aware/attentive, be happy to still be alive and let go of wanting or expecting anything," how does that deal with the violence and suffering that exist? That is what I'm asking. Perhaps it does deal with it and we can find out how.

How does intellectualizing about it, wringing your hands over it, whining about violence and pain end it? I once spent 11 months and 26 days, exactly, trading bullets and other ordinance in a criminal and completely insane war, a war crime in and of itself, and I know something about violence. Violence ends with you. But it also begins with you, with me, with us. And violence ends only when it ends with us. Not through committees, discussions, political movements or ideas. It ends with you, each one of us. It ends when we see our own conflict and confusion, when we stop trying to be something you think you're suppose to be or want to be. We are not separate from violence we are violence. We think we are individuals separate from the whole, from the collective. We're not.

We are all part of the collective, the conditioned, and the collective is violence. The only way to end violence is to see it in yourself, seeing that your are part of the whole of society Let go of all of your organized religious beliefs, your ideas, you hopes and dreams, your ambitions, your desires because all of this is feeding the violence, the hate, the unfairness in this world. Can you see that?

Jack Pine wrote:I once spent 11 months and 26 days, exactly, trading bullets and other ordinance in a criminal and completely insane war, a war crime in and of itself, and I know something about violence. Violence ends with you.

Experiencing war at first hand must have been a horrific thing to go through. Growing up in Scotland I saw a lot of violence related to alcohol abuse, especially amongst young men. I was attacked on the street myself and fights and brawls were fairly commonplace on Friday and Saturday nights in the centre of the city where I lived. In this case, it seemed that alcohol acted as a kind of release valve for all the pent up frustrations which young men had inside them and were unresolved. These frustrations generated anger which in turn led to violence. I suppose people were frustrated because of the way they were treated, often with little respect or affection. Perhaps a frustrated young man felt better about himself after he had given someone a good kicking.

Like anythging else, it seems important to understand the complex dynamics of what leads to violence in order to bring about change. Why do we get angry? What is going on there exactly?

Jack Pine wrote:The only way to end violence is to see it in yourself, seeing that your are part of the whole of society

Yes. This is exactly why I am bringing in the issue of violence.

We can be so concerned with the problems of method/technique, that we throw up our hands and say there's no way to deliberately do meditation. If it happens, it happens. But since it's not, there's nothing I can do anyway.

But I'm saying, if you see the violence in the world, and you see that you are a part of that violence, then you cannot toss meditation aside. There's an urgency. If I'm not aware of my internal violence, I'll keep spreading it around to others I contact.

After all, why bother to follow every thought? What a pain. And who can really do it? Sure, give it a half hearted go. But to really watch every thought, in solitary quiet sitting, as well as throughout the day in various activities?

The only way it will really happen is if the urgency is crystal clear. If I don't even notice when I'm mean to my spouse or friend or co-worker, how will it stop?